Getting There

We have arrived. You know the saying “Getting there is half the fun”? During the 22 hours we were in the air, the 8 hours we sat in airports during layovers, and the 2 hours collecting our luggage we discovered that that statement is not mathematically accurate. I would not estimate it as being more than one third of the fun, and that’s if I was being generous. Even though I absolutely love to fly, after hour 19 I was ready for “getting there” to come to an end. Some of the highlights were:
1. Flying over the Rocky Mountains. It is quite a sight to see how the seemingly endless plains of the Midwest abruptly end, and the land suddenly reaches up to the sky for as far as the eye can see. Wonder of wonders.
2. Airline food. Yes that’s right. The food on the Air China flights was actually pretty tasty and they fed us quite well. On our flight from San Francisco to Beijing we received lunch, dinner, and a snack. During the last leg of our flight we were fed dinner again. One of the sides with one of the meals was “fungus and pears soup”. It looked like chopped pears in juice with some unidentified semi-translucent slices floating in the juice. I guess that was the fungus. It was pretty good. With my meal I decided to be adventurous and try Chinese made wine. Now the Chinese are known for a lot of things but wine is not one of them. But hey, I just had fungus, why stop there. The wine too was OK. I guess it was probably equivalent to Yellow Tail wine. As a table wine it is not bad, but it is not up to the quality of wine that they served us when we flew Air France a couple years ago. We like flying Air France so much because of the food and wine that when I was looking for tickets to China I checked the price on Air France. They were 11,000 dollars a ticket. Bring on the fungus!
3. The people. If you like people there are obviously plenty to like in China. Amanda and I sat between an older lady from Shanghai and a man from Xiamen. We chatted with them the best we could in our fledgling Mandarin. They were both very friendly. We met an American couple that was traveling to Shanghai. It is amazing how many waigou ren (foreigners) there are here and they are from all over the world. We have met Germans, French, and Dutch people and we have been here only a day. I enjoy watching all the people. Everyone has a story to tell. Sometimes you can learn a little bit of it just by watching.
Things are going good so far. Within hours of our arrival we had made some new friends, found an apartment to stay in temporarily (for free), while we search for a place of our own, and got invited to a party. Our friends have been really been helpful in helping us get settled in, and they have told us that there is definitely work for us to do here. I can’t wait to get to it.
The culture is different. You know it is one thing to know this intellectually but quite another to experience it firsthand. There are things that it is going to take awhile for me to get used to, and there are different things for Amanda. Well, I guess we just need to find our niche to fit in. – Frank
There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. More than a BILLION people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you." A. Whitney Brown